Rajeev Dhavan to Malala to JNU V-C: The 15 biggest intellectual disappointments of 2019

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint

The saying goes “nobody is a hero to his valet”. And what 24/7 news and the Internet age have done is made everyone the valet of celebrities. No longer can they carefully curate their image, mercilessly pilloried as they are by public opinion, their every failing publicly amplified. 

This is my list of the 15 steepest falls of 2019. While some like Justin Trudeau and Elon Musk were taken down after years of public adulation, people like Greta Thunberg came crashing down even before they really took off.

Greta Thunberg: The problem with single point heroes or, in this case, “sheroes” is that they usually fall due to their incompetence. Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist, was never a good candidate for the cause of protecting ‘mother Earth’ because she essentially came across as encouraging truancy in schoolchildren. Her 15 seconds of fame due to her now infamous “how dare you” has spawned a lot of memes, mostly of the kind ridiculing her, even though her views on climate change were fairly nuanced, allowing developing countries space for more emissions while asking for a greater burden on the developed countries. But her ideas are untenable. For example, she refuses to fly citing carbon emissions, ignoring the fact that modern air travel is a massive employment generator and technology driver, but also that airplanes cause far less pollution than cars or ships carrying the same number of people over the same distance. Moreover, air travel has, since the 1970s’ advent of the Boeing 747, become affordable for millions more, spurring the modern hospitality industry. While making transatlantic crossings on a millionaire’s sailboat is fine for the select few, going back to the 1800s is a non-starter for the world at large. Compounding this is her fibbing about crowded trains while holding first-class tickets and eating train meals with copious quantities of plastic containers on display. Threatening that you will “put (people) against the wall” doesn’t help either, given Sweden’s collaborationist past with the Nazis.

Aung San Suu Kyi: If Greta Thunberg’s celebrity was a classic example of the difference between reality and dreams, then in the world of Realpolitik no one had it worse than Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi. For someone who built her career opposing the excesses of military rule, and winning the Nobel Peace Prize for it, Suu Kyi sure made a complete U-turn. Of course, one should have seen it coming. She had always been less than forthcoming about the Rohingyas and the need to integrate them into the Burmese mainstream, given the strident ethno-nationalist sentiment in that country. However, her defence of the disproportionate use of force was the last straw. Her stand that there were excesses but they did not tantamount to genocide was technically correct, but her assertion that anyone in the military would be held accountable was laughable. Which military officer in Burma has ever been?

Justin Trudeau: As the saying goes, those who live by the camera, die by the camera. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has always been reviled by his opponents as the classic example of an over-the-top SJW (social justice warrior), far too smug for his own good. Be it cringe-inducing moments like “peoplekind” or treating his India visit as some fancy dress party, or paying compensation to a Canadian citizen regarded as a terrorist, Trudeau has never been taken seriously by the serious Left, but has always managed to get the pop-Left votes. No wonder then that the entire blackface controversy put an end to his posturing. For a leader who claims to be in touch with popular sentiment, Trudeau getting caught on three separate occasions blackening his face was bad enough. But his non-apology, blaming society for his casual racism than admit his own personal failing, only made it worse. At any rate, he seems to be keeping a low profile ever since.

Eliot Higgins & Bellingcat: Nobody has done more to bring open-source intelligence (OSINT) into the limelight than British blogger and citizen journalist Eliot Higgins and his organisation Bellingcat – be it precise geolocation of tanks and armour during the Russian intervention in Ukraine, or the chemical attacks in Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War in 2013. By 2014, of course, the entire Bellingcat narrative of a watertight case against Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons came undone. Eliot, who has no formal training on any of the subjects he writes on, was called out on several scores by MIT professors Theodore Postol and Richard Lloyd. But his celebrity went unabated, with several publications quoting him and Bellingcat without question, despite their lack of formal training. However, 2019 is when things gathered steam over the OPCW report on the 2018 chemical attacks in Douma, Syria. Turns out, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons relied on Bellingcat over its own investigators and with Bellingcat unable to substantiate its views, the OPCW resorted to fudging evidence.

Michelle Bachelet: The former President of Chile and the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has a lot to say when it comes to enforced disappearances and torture. But she has maintained a remarkable silence on the plight of the Baloch who are abducted and turn up dead with sickening frequency, usually bearing the marks of unspeakable torture. Bachelet’s own family has a past with such abduction and torture. Her father, Air Force Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet Martínez, was jailed for opposing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, ultimately dying in prison of cardiac arrest resulting from extreme torture. To escape torture, Bachelet fled to Australia and finally to East Germany. One would expect her to be more sympathetic towards those who face similar treatment but she remains mum on the persecution of the Baloch. Moreover, unlike Aung San Suu Kyi, Bachelet has no obligations towards her state. Chile also doesn’t have any real relations with Pakistan to be concerned about, which makes her silence all the more disappointing.

Malala Yousufzai: The Nobel Peace Prize winner who shot to fame campaigning for women’s educational rights made anodyne statements on Kashmir, but not even a whimper on the abductions, torture, and killings in her native Pakistan. What more needs to be said?

Sam Pitroda: He who flies the highest falls the hardest. Entrepreneur Sam Pitroda had cemented his reputation as the “man behind India’s telecom revolution” during his stint under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But having donned the mantle of court clown following Mani Shankar Aiyar’s unceremonious exit, Sam Pitroda not only dragged the Congress into unnecessary controversy, but also drew attention to his not so stellar past. His normalisation of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom by saying “hua toh hua” repulsed many and forced the Congress to impose a gag on several others. Not only that, Pitroda’s “telecom revolution” too was rejected as phoney in a detailed report that looked at the growth of mobile telephony in India.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The author of bestsellers Antifragile and The Black Swan came down several notches in his ongoing feud with the Libertarian magazine Quillette and its editor Claire Lehmann. The source of friction was IQ, behavioural genetics and psychology. Despite Lehmann substantiating her claim of bringing out the various pros and cons of these subjects in her magazine, Taleb persisted in a highly personalised campaign against her and Quillette, forcing many to wonder what exactly he was raging about.

Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar: The vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) represents the worst nightmare for the Indian Right. He has been at the receiving end of a highly shrill campaign focussing on his alleged saffronisation of JNU. The problem is that the Right feels he has done nothing concrete since taking over. While JNU continues to be in the news for all the wrong reasons, spending most of its academic year being in the grip of student agitations, gheraos, vandalism, lockouts; the inaction of V-C Jagadesh Kumar, makes him look incompetent.

Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib & Rana Safvi: If being called out on a daily basis on Twitter by a handle that goes by the name of ‘True Indology’ isn’t bad enough, the Ayodhya verdict in many ways was a serious blow to these historians’ credibility. While historian Meenakshi Jain had dismissed many of their specific claims in her book on the Ayodhya issue The Battle for Rama, the Supreme Court verdict was the coup de grâce.

Rajeev Dhavan: The Indian Right is convinced that senior Supreme Court advocate Rajeev Dhavan is their mole in the Left. His ill-tempered arguments in the Ayodhya hearings, all rhetoric and devoid of facts, were lauded by his opponents as “doing Ram Lalla’s work”. In short, if there was a case to be made against the temple, nobody sunk it the way Dhavan did.

Joko Widodo: You would have expected the President of Indonesia, a member of a Centre-Left party‎, to be progressive. Far from it. Joko Widodo has proven himself to be the exact opposite. Besides expediting death penalties, he has refused to accept greater LGBTQ rights, and is considering outlawing extramarital sex, penalising insults to the president, and restricting contraception and abortions.

Jeremy Corbyn: That the man was a train wreck should have been evident to all, save the Leftist echo chamber. Perhaps buoyed by this sort of brainless sycophancy, he went so extreme that he has destroyed the British Left, taking it to their worst defeat since 1935.

Elon Musk: As early as 2016, Singapore deemed Tesla’s electric vehicles to be notoriously fuel inefficient. They consumed far more energy than other cars to travel the same distance. All a Tesla does is shift emissions from the car to the electricity generation plant. But what really established Elon Musk as more hype than substance was his criticism of British cave diver Vernon Unsworth, who assisted in the rescue of a group of schoolchildren trapped in a cave in Thailand. Calling Vernon a “pedo guy”, Elon ultimately had to admit in court documents that he was an “idiot”.

Adrian van Hooydonk: The man who took the extraordinarily sexy BMW and in the space of months destroyed its two most iconic design features – the double kidney grille, and the ‘hofmeister kink’ of its rear side windows. He turned the former into Darth Vader’s helmet and the latter into some cheap Japanese car replica.

Some honourable mentions who didn’t make the list were the globalist school of international relations including Daniel Drezner, Joseph Nye and Stephen Walt with their predictions as to the course of global affairs being proven wrong repeatedly. The Quad, a group of four progressive female US legislators similarly seem set to give their arch-enemy Donald Trump a second term in office. John Bolton for his part in failing to start a war in 2019 – the only reason he had been made the US’ National Security Adviser in the first place. 

But not to worry, 2020 will no doubt bring another delicious list of fails, feeding our schadenfreude, as we watch them get knocked off their pedestals munching on popcorn and sipping champagne while they endure public humiliation for our pleasure.

The author is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. He tweets @iyervval. Views are personal.